(From Crain’s Insider, March 30, 2010)
By ERIK ENGQUIST and DANIEL MASSEY
Education insiders pored through a 44-page technical review form released by the U.S. Department of Education yesterday and discovered that New York had come up 35 points short in its first attempt to win up to $700 million in federal Race to the Top funds–next to last among the 16 finalists.
Gov. Paterson blamed the state’s failure in the first round on legislators’ inability to institute reforms: “It was rather obvious that we lost points in the scoring, as I warned back in January, because we did not raise the cap on charter schools [and] because we were not aggressive enough in removing legislation that would ban the linking of teacher evaluations based on student performance.”
New York received only 27.4 out of a possible 40 points in the category aimed at ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charter schools. “This is one of the areas where we can pick up points [for the second round of funding],” says Joe Williams, president of pro-charter group Democrats for Education Reform. “New York would have a pretty well-rounded application if we did improve the charter score.”
Applications for the next round, when a pot of $3.4 billion will be available, are due June 1.
A spokesman for New York State United Teachers, which has fought charters, highlighted the fact that Arizona, which has the highest percentage of charter schools in the nation, came in second-to-last out of 41 overall applicants.
Charter schools wasn’t the only area where New York’s application was lagging. Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised the “statewide buy-in” to education reform goals of the two winners, Delaware and Tennessee, but New York received only 53.6 out of 65 possible points for getting local education agencies across the state to participate in the state’s reform agenda. New York received only 10 of 24 points for fully implementing a “statewide data system.” The state also received low marks for judging teachers and principals on performance, picking up only 17 of 28 points in the category for using evaluations to inform key personnel decisions.